Personal Stories of the Holocaust and Survival

Birenbaum, Halina. Hope is the Last to Die: A Personal Documentation of Nazi Terror. Oswiecim: Publishing House of the State Museum in Oswiecim, 1994. DS135.P62 W256313 1994
The author, born in 1929, was 16 years old when the war ended and she returned from the concentration camp. This is her story of the Warsaw Ghetto and the camps that she endured.

Crane, Cynthia. Divided Lives: The Untold Stories of Jewish-Christian Women in Nazi Germany. NY: St. Martin's, 2000.
DS135 .G5 D59 2000
The stories of ten women who were Mischehe, products of Jewish-Christian mixed marriage that was illegal under Hitler's government. They survived, but lost family members.

Epstein, Helen. Children of the Holocaust: Conversations with Sons and Daughters of Survivors. New York: Penguin, 1988.
D804.3 .E67 1988
The author interviewed hundreds of people who had grown up in families in many countries and whose parents who had survived the Holocaust. Many revealed they shared similar psychological effects .

Frank, Anne, . The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition. Eds. Otto Frank and Mirjam Pressler. New York: Anchor Books/Doubleday, 1996. DS135.N6 F73313 1996
This edition, edited by her father, has about 30 percent more material than the first edition that was published.

Frankl, Viktor Emil. Man's Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy. Cutchogue, NY: Buccaneer, 1992.
D810.J4 F72713 1992b
Frankl, a psychiatrist, survived the camps, but his sister was the only other member of his family to survive. He constructed his Logotherapy to help others understand what could make life worth living after experiencing such extreme cruelties.

Fremont, Helen. After Long Silence: A Memoir. New York, NY: Dell, 2000. E184.37.F74 A4 2000 c.2
This was our common book for the 2000-2001 year. Fremont wrote a memoir of her parents' escape from Poland and their family life in the U.S. where she was born.

Friedman, Henry. I'm No Hero: Journeys of a Holocaust Survivor. Seattle: U of Washington P, 1999.
DS135.U43 F754 1999
The author frankly recounts how he and his family were hidden in a barn loft for 18 months, survived the war, and eventually moved to Seattle. In 1988 he returned to Poland and connected with the girl who had hidden them.

Greif, Gideon. We Wept without Tears: Testimonies of the Jewish Sonderkommando from Auschwitz. New Haven, CT; Yale UP, 2005. D805.5.A96 G73513 1995
Interviews with seven surviving Jewish prisoners at Auschwitz-Birkenau who were forced to remove and cremate the bodies of those murdered in the gas chambers. The author is a researcher at Yad Vashem in Israel.

Hallie, Philip Paul. Lest Innocent Blood be Shed: The Story of the Village of Le Chambon, and How Goodness Happened There. New York: Harper Colophon, 1980. DS135.F85 C453 1980
A history of Andre Trocme who led his congregation in the south of France to risk their lives to make a refuge for Jews fleeing persecution in the north of France.

Levi, Primo. The Drowned and the Saved. New York: Summit Books, 1988. D810.J4 L45313 1988
Primo's last book, in which he stated "there is no need for wars or violence, under any circumstances," He also looked back on the advantages and disadvantages of being an intellectual in Auschwitz.

---. Moments of Reprieve. New York: RCA, 1967.
PQ4872.E8 Z4713 1987
Sketches of people Levi knew and remembered from Auschwitz.

---. The Periodic Table. New York: Schocken Books, 1984.
PQ4872.E8 S513 1984 c.2
This collection of 21 stories, each named after an element in Mendeleev's table, may be Levi's masterpiece. It is also part-autobiography and discusses the conflicts within science.

---. The Reawakening. New York: Macmillan, 1993.
D804.3 .L48413 1993
Levi, one of the most recognized authors of the Holocaust, writes of his return to Italy after being freed from Auschwitz and reflects on what he has learned about human nature through the events he witnessed.

---. Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity. New York: Simon, 1996.
D805.P7 L4413 1996
Levi's account of life at Auschwitz. As an Italian, a fragment of a canto of Ulysses in Dante’s Inferno came to mind and he compares Auschwitz with Dante's journey into hell. The only apparent escape would be through a crematorium chimney.

Lusseyran, Jacques. And There Was Light: Autobiography of Jacques Lusseyran, Blind Hero of the French Resistance. New York: Parabola, 1998. D802.F8 L77313 1998
An autobiography of a man, who grew up in France, and by the age of sixteen was leading an underground resistance movement despite being blind.

Marks, Jane. The Hidden Children: The Secret Survivors of the Holocaust. New York: Ballantine, 1995.
D804.3 .M368 1995
The history of 23 children who were hidden during the war years and survived to tell us their story.

Rose, Daniel Asa. Hiding Places: A Father and His Sons Retrace their Family's Escape from the Holocaust. New York: Simon, 2000.
F105.J5 R67 2000
A memoir written by the child of a Holocaust survivor who takes his two young sons to France and Belgium to "hunt" for the hiding places of his family, who escaped capture.

Stille, Alexander. Benevolence and Betrayal: Five Italian Jewish Families Under Fascism. New York: Penguin, 1993.
DS135.I9 A17 1993
This book is based on interviews of five Italian Jewish families who varied tremendously in their response to Italian fascism. The author's father left Italy for New York in 1941, the same year the Goldschmidts left Germany.

Vegh, Claudine. I Didn't Say Goodbye: Interviews with Children of the Holocaust. New York: Dutton, 1984.
DS135.F89 J413 1984
Interviews with adults who had survived the Holocaust but witnessed atrocities and suffered losses as young children. Powerful emotions make it difficult for them to talk of their experiences even though many years have passed.

Vrba, Rudolf with Alan Bestic. I Cannot Forgive. Vancouver, B.C.: Regent University P, 1997.
D805.5.A96 V73 1993
A Czech survivor who escaped from Auschwitz in 1944 and reported to the world the conditions he observed and endured.

Wiesel, Elie. From the Kingdom of Memory: Reminiscences. New York: Summit, 1990.
PQ2683.I32 Z464 1990
A collection of Wiesel's essays and speeches, including"Why I Write" and his Nobel Lecture delivered in 1986.

---. Night. New York: Hill and Wang, 2006.
D810.J4 W65 2006
The powerful autobiographical account of Wiesel's experience as a teenager who survived Birkenau, Auschwitz, Buna and Buchenwald, and the guilt that remained because so many (including his own father, mother, and youngest sister) did not survive.

Wyden, Peter. Stella. New York: Simon, 1992.
DS135.G5 G55979
This is the tale of the author's classmate Stella, who collaborated with the Gestapo and betrayed the Jews while attempting to hide in Berlin.

Zargani, Aldo. For Solo Violin: A Jewish Childhood in Fascist Italy: A Memoir. Philadelphia, PA: Paul Dry, 2002.
PQ4886.A75 Z4713
This family survived by fleeing to Northwest Italy where the author and his brother were hidden in a Catholic boarding school. Eventually they moved again to the Piedmont area held by partisans.